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Notes -
Debating five year peak evil versus career Evil Above Replacement and Evil Efficiency versus Counting Stat Evil Accumulation. Can we come up with an equivalent for an Evil Dak Prescott with good evil stats but they're all in evil garbage time?
I feel sad that I am not getting this joke :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wins_Above_Replacement helped a bit
So a debate sports fans love to have is ranking old timers in various forms. The GOAT NBA player, the GOAT shortstop, the GOAT Miami Dolphin. And part of that debate is defining Greatest, and there are classic ways the debate breaks down.
Is the GOAT the guy who had the best peak to his career, or is a guy who was not quite as good at their respective bests but did it for longer superior? Sandy Koufax won three cy young awards in four years and accumulated half his career WAR in those four years, while a player like Derek Jeter never had anything close to that kind of performance, but put up more wins over the course of a 20 year career. Which is "greater" as a career? Which more deserving of going to Cooperstown?
Is a guy who accumulated the most stats (hits, points, wins etc) the best, or should we look more at how efficiently he accumulated those stats? This is especially a big debate in basketball, where players usage is more variable: in baseball the players get up to bat as often as they get up to bat, while in basketball a player might hog the ball and take lower percentage shots in volume and end up with a bunch of points even though it would have been better for him to pass the ball to a teammate, while a player who makes only high percentage shots adds more to the team even if he accumulates fewer points.
Dak Prescott is the quarterback for a rival NFL team to my own favorite team. He's, factually, pretty good at his job, but a frequent criticism of Dak is that he's less than his stat sheet indicates. He puts up fantastic numbers against weak teams, but loses the big games. Or, against a tough team like Baltimore two weeks ago, his team falls way behind early as Dak screws the pooch, then he'll engineer half a comeback and lose anyway. But after the game he'll have pretty good numbers and it will look like he had a decent game, while in reality most of the numbers he put up didn't matter because it was "garbage time" the game was already over.
For evil athlete equivalents:
Evil Sandy Koufax (greatest four year peak evil): Khmer Rouge, hands down
Evil Derek Jeter (overrated, but actually very solid numbers over time and a lot of big wins): The British Empire
Evil Nikola Jokic (highly efficient play that flies under the radar): Mao Zedong
Evil Carmelo Anthony (Big counting stats but poor efficiency): Adolf Hitler
Evil Dak Prescott (Only achieved anything in garbage time when the game was already decided): Stepan Bandera
Evil Mike Trout (Truly evil but never had the team around him to do it in the playoffs): Yassir Arafat
Evil Dustin Pedroia (Just a little guy, but gets dirt on his uniform, just keeps pluggin' away): Benjamin Netanyahu
ETA
Evil Ben Simmons (huge hype but never delivered): Fidel Castro
Evil Wilt Chamberlain (unbeatable records against questionable competition before the modern era): Genghis Khan
Evil Ken Griffey Jr (amazing career cut short too early leaving us to ask what might have been): Reinhard Heidrich
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